Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to network connection technologies.
Background of the Related Art
In current networking technologies, there has been an explosive growth of commercial information exchange requests that the network must be capable of providing at a high access bandwidth, performance and redundancy. An aggregated link may be used to provide a higher link bandwidth, improved link transmission flexibility, and greater redundancy, and has become an important technology in network connections.
FIG. 1 shows a typical network connection topological structure 100. The network connection topological structure 100 includes a communication network 102, a router 104, a switch 106 and a server pool 108. The communication network 102 is a medium used for implementing communication. For example, the communication network 102 may include (but is not limited to) the Internet, a cloud network, a wireless network (Wi-Fi), a wireless local area network (WLAN), a local area network (LAN), a plain old telephone service (POTS) and/or a metropolitan area network (MAN). The devices in the network connection topological structure 100 may be connected to the communication network 102 according to various wired and wireless communication protocols. The router 104 is used for searching for an optimal transmission path for a data frame passing through the router 104, and effectively transmitting the data to a destination site. The switch 106 includes multiple physical ports respectively used for connecting each server in the server pool 108 as a peer.
To implement load sharing of inlet/outlet traffic in member ports, the multiple physical switch ports of the switch 106 may be bound together to form a logical port, so as to be connected to the server pool 108. This logical port of multiple physical ports is referred to as an aggregated link (trunk), and is represented as an aggregated link 110 in FIG. 1. In use of the aggregated link 110, the switch 106 may determine, according to a port load sharing strategy configured by a user, from which member port a packet is sent to the peer server.
In use of the aggregated link 110, the switch 106 may further work in a dispatched mode, and load balancing is performed between the servers in a manner such as MAC exchange. The dispatched mode requests that the server supports a hybrid traffic access; however, this can provide a magnificent traffic exchange, for example, for some time-critical cloud services. The aggregated link can reduce the load of the switch and provide a line-rate hash distribution, and can provide a shorter waiting time, and higher bandwidth and redundancy.
In the typical network connection of topological structure 100 shown in FIG. 1, the peer device is multiple servers in the server pool 108, but the peer device may also be multiple other switches. As shown in FIG. 1, in the link aggregation technology, the aggregated link generally needs to be connected between multiple peer devices (switches or servers), or even between peer devices (switches or servers) of multiple manufacturers. However, devices of different manufacturers may run different protocols. Currently, it cannot be supported to establish an aggregated link between a switch and multiple peer devices running different protocols. Therefore, a user may be limited when buying a switch or server used as a peer, and the user has to buy products of a single manufacture to avoid problems arising from incompatible protocols. Therefore, a new network connection technology is needed to solve the protocol compatibility problem of peer devices from different manufacturers.